Getting Real with Noam Birnbaum — Ignition

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Well, hello, hello, hello again everyone. My name is Bill Gallagher. I'm the host of the show your friendly neighborhood Scaling Up Coach and we bring loads of episodes like this every week. We've got hundreds of episodes now in the back catalog@scalingcoach.com or wherever you get your podcast love. We've got downloads of all the tools that we talk about in the show, notes and all the points and references the speakers make there our guests make on the show. We'll send you a free copy of the book scaling up@scalingcoach.com as well as you can go search the things. So if you're like interested in solving some strategy problem, you'll find things there around strategy. You'll find stuff to do with the people decisions and the cash and the execution and all of the leadership lessons that go along the way. These Getting Real episodes that we're doing now on the Scaling Up Podcast Livestream explore how leadership gets developed and is shaped over time with the growth of our companies. What are the lucky breaks that we've had and how have we navigated the breakdowns and the surprises that we face along the way? What are the things that have frightened us or even embarrassed us as we've gone through?

Do we have any regrets?

And how are we growing and developing as leaders? These episodes in the Getting Real series are sponsored by the Bay Area Entrepreneurs Organization Chapters, commonly known as eo. Our member led organization is the best place for entrepreneurs to learn and grow and connect with other peers who are in the same sort of process. I'm proud to have been a member of this organization for over 20 years now. Can you believe it? And in different roles and leadership throughout the organization and with several different companies. EO members in the Bay Area are then supported and connected by over 14,000 members across 61 chapters worldwide on every continent. So there's access to a world of entrepreneurship and acceptance and connection that is really unprecedented. So if you'd like to apply for membership or to get more information about EO, just visit eonetwork.org order up us a note here and we'll connect you. Listen in now as we talk with no on about his journey, his experience as an entrepreneur. Noam, welcome to the show.

Thanks Bill. 20 years. That's amazing, right?

It's kind of frightening.

You must like it or something.

A lifer. I've definitely gotten some value out of it along the way.

Absolutely. That's great.

Yeah. I started with a tech company. I had a software company at the time, a development business and then we started a SaaS business and then I worked with the jewelry company and then today I, you know, full time coach, we still own the jewelry business and there's many ups and downs. But we're here to talk about your story today. Noam and I are for our listeners. Noam is a graduate of our, of our farm team that started the thing. So I launched an accelerator program, the San Francisco chapter. Noam went through that program, grew his company up, joined EO and is now in our newest chapter, the EO San Francisco East Bay Group, of which I'm the president elect. So I'm really happy to have Noam on the show today. Welcome.

Thank you. I am such an advocate of EO accelerator for companies that are under a million in revenue. It was pivotal for me to get me over that, over that mark and really taught me so many things that you know, if I had picked them up on my own, it would have taken way longer.

So for our listeners and viewers, the EO accelerator program is, is a subset really of the scaling up curriculum tool set offered through the EO organization for people who haven't yet grown their business up to qualifying and really helps them get. So we take the core tools of scaling up, we apply them for earlier stage companies and take companies through that. People spend two or three years in the program as they grow and develop their company and then hopefully they graduate, they hit the marks and they join the EO as Noam has done.

That's funny you say two or three years because it took me four, which is totally in line. I'm sure we will probably talk about this today, but I tend to go slowly on things. I do a good job. My work output is really, it's really high quality. But I'm also slow.

You just want to really get it right.

I do actually. It's.

Now let me just tell listeners that you are founder and CEO of Ignition, an IT managed services provider and you've been in that industry for three decades. Right? Starting at a very young age and then growing. They work with companies around the Bay Area, Northern California and really focused in particular on venture backed startups. And Noam's got a couple of middle schoolers and is dealing with the pandemic in his own way. Also penis backpacker and cyclist.

That's right.

So welcome to the show. Let's talk about a little bit about your business. So when did you, when do you think you first got hit with this affliction of entrepreneurship? When did you decide you were going to be an Entrepreneur.

I mean, if you want to go way back, I think my dad set me up for it, actually. Not that he was an entrepreneur. On the contrary, he worked for New York state for like, 40 years. He had a nice government job and a pension and all that. The thing is, he hated his regular nine to five routines. He told me once he wrote two letters a day, he drank two cups of coffee a day, and he took two naps a day. So he really didn't, like. Like it made it sound. He made the corporate life sound, like, so stultifying and horrible. Horrible. And like, I just kind of felt like I just don't want to do that. I don't know what else I'm gonna do, but I just don't want to do that. That's just not for me. And I didn't know what my other options were as a young person, but I just kind of always like, maybe had that. That leaning towards, I gotta find my own way, whatever that is. Even if it might be wrong. Hopefully not.

So you had a funny idea for a career before working in it. Tell the listeners.

I like to say I got into it because I wanted to be a novelist. Sure. Not your, like, common melding of things. I was a bookworm when I was a kid and loved writing and seemed to have a talent for it. And that's really what I wanted to do with my life. And so I got out of college with the highly marketable creative writing degree and was like, well, I just. I guess I spent all this money on this thing. I better, like, use it, right? So I decided to, like, really focus on trying to build a writing career as a fiction writer. And I moved out to San Francisco just for the romance and adventure of it, because, you know, so many of my literary idols have gotten their names there. And, you know, I wanted to see where the 1960s happened and all that. And I got to San Francisco right in 1996 when the DOT com boom had just started. I had no idea. I thought I was arriving in the city of peace and love. And what I found were lines around the block for people to view apartments that were just for rent. Stories of people walking into these apartment showings with, like, a suitcase of cash to pay the first six months or whatever. I had no idea what was going on. But it so happened that I had computer skills, I had technology skills, because, well, I had always also been a kind of a computer nerd, a video game nerd. And in college I had had a work study position working in the college computer Lab helping students with just kind of like how to use the computers and the printers and the network and just to get their work done. Um, so I decided, you know what, I'm going to see if I could find like a part time tech job that will give me some time to pursue my chosen career of writing. And I did, I did. I found a part time tech job. You know, 1996, tech jobs were, what'd you say work?

South park neighborhood.

Yeah, right. Very close.

I was living there then.

Yep, yep. South park is a different place now anyway, so that's, that's kind of like. That was my original motivation was really I just wanted a job or a career or something that wasn't even a career. I just so that I could pursue my real career. Right, yeah.

Writing.

Yeah. So I've always had this kind of iconic.

What was the novel coming?

What'd you say?

I said, how's the novel coming?

Well, that's an interesting. You know, as with so many young aspiring novelists, it turns out I hate when I'm like, you know, exposed as a hypocrite. But yeah, it turns out that like, it's not that I didn't have the talent, I didn't have the attention span. No, I tried. I really tried. Like I worked, I wrote three, four hours a day, six days a week for 10 years. I really, really tried. My heart, my hardest. But it turns out that just the form wasn't for me. I just could. I'm a little too ADHD to get into that. So I eventually gravitated to poetry, which was a much more manageable short form and I was pretty good at that too. And I self published a few chapbooks of poetry that I then I peddled them around the local Bay area bookstores, the independent booksellers. I walked in, asked to speak to their acquisitions folks and like a couple bookstores put my self published chapbooks out and I sold a couple of them. I made about six bucks, went and bought myself a celebratory mocha with the proceeds. I don't think I filed it on my taxes. And after 10 years of this writing gig, I thought, well, you know what, I'm not going to make any money as a poet and I want to have kids. So practicality set in. So then I decided, you know, well, what am I going to do now? Well, I've been doing, actually I started computer consulting, started IT consulting when I was 23 in order to keep my writing career going. So why don't I see what I Can do with that since I've already got some velocity there. And that's when I really, I count that as kind of like the second birth of my company. The first birth was when I just started doing independent consulting. Whole thing, I was 23 year old. And then the rebirth was kind of when I decided, you know what, I'm going to see if I can make this into a career. Let's see how that goes.

So you start off doing this thing and then what was your lucky break? Where did you. Well, I guess it had been at least just being in that place doing anything tech related, right?

In a way, yeah. I mean everybody now is of course, you know, kind of adjusting to the new work from home environment. Right. I was working from home since I was 23 and I would go to coffee shops in San Francisco and see other people with laptops and kind of think, I think they might be working from home too. Right. It was just part of the, it was just in the air even though you didn't know many people who did it. So yeah, the environment was certainly part of it. But I think I would have done this anywhere. Right. It would have looked different. Certainly. There's. It's really unique to do technology consulting in the Bay Area. Absolutely. I speak to my colleagues and competitors from other parts of the country and their business models are completely upside down from how we do business. Because we're in such a unique place and our clients need us to be cutting edge. They need us to be more cutting edge than any other IT consultancy they can find anywhere in the country. And so we have to be. So it's really changed. It has shaped the way Ignition has formed as a business model.

Just for reference, talk about what's the extent of your work, what do you actually do for companies?

You know, the industry term is managed services provider and managed security services provider. I hate those terms because they just sound so cold. Like what, what is that exactly? Like managed services, what service are you managing? What does that mean? So I don't use those terms, but I'm sure many of the listeners today have heard those. Yeah. You know, I like to describe us in short form as like an IT support and cybersecurity consultancy. Right. Fundamentally that's what we do. We do IT support and consult cybersecurity for small and medium sized businesses which out here in the Bay Area are largely venture backed startups. And so we are the only IT firm on the planet that specializes in the venture backed startup market. And what I mean by that, you can Google you know, probably venture backed startup it, you'll find some companies that have like a page for it. Literally. Our business model was designed to fulfill the IT and security needs of venture backed startups. So we've really focused on that market segment a lot.

So do you do like networking, desktop provisioning, do you set up everything for IT so it's very turnkey?

Yeah, usually the outsource the fully outsourced IT department for a company. Now we don't just work with startups, we work with traditional companies as well. And in this last two years or so, since about 2019, we've started to have a national footprint so we're working with companies across the country, most of whom are not venture backed startups. Right. Unless you're in like New York or Austin or Seattle, you're not going to find too many of those. So we are working with traditional companies that are larger, so like up to about 500 seats. We work directly with their IT directors and their IT managers on very targeted things that they need help with that we are experts in because of our focus on cloud and security and what it's like to kind of be building that next generation IT infrastructure that the startups are pushing us to learn how to do really well.

Yeah, the cloud thing brings a whole new thing especially as people have increasing collections of SaaS, apps, whether it's just single sign on or okta provisioning type stuff. Right. That's a whole set of.

It's a totally different paradigm and I'm so proud of my team that you know, I've pushed them to say folks, we have to be really good at this next generation IT stuff. All the cloud based stuff, zero trust it's frequently called or beyond Corp, this idea that you're not going to have your employees in a physical building anymore. And now that the pandemic has accelerated that trend and when they're not all in a physical building, how can you trust these connections coming into your data from all over the world? How can you trust that they are authorized to access the data? It's this new model of both how to do security and how to do it. Our team has specialized in IT and we have a really rare specialty in IT that has allowed us to branch out from just the venture backed startup demographic and help companies as they're hitting this learning edge of well, how do we do this now in 2021?

So we talked about, you got a little lucky by being in this field and in this time and place where it's a growth demand and and you found your way doing some unique things. We'll come back to that. But it sounds like you also referenced a challenge, being slower to commit or to get things done, that you're very cautious. Talk about that. How has that shown up and been a challenge for you and how have you dealt with that?

Yeah, I am slow. I'm a very. I actually don't. When I was younger, I thought I was indecisive, but I actually don't think that's it anymore. When I make a decision, I'm extremely decisive. It just takes me a long time to figure it out. And it just takes me a long time. I collect a lot of data and I listen to my gut. And from one day to the next, my gut will be telling me different things as I'm sorting through stuff. And actually what I've realized is that the best decisions, the ones that are truest and strongest and most sure tend to arise around three in the morning when I just wake up and suddenly that thing I've been worrying about, or maybe I didn't even know I was worrying about it. Okay, I know the answer and here's why. And that's what I need to do. And I go back to bed and the next day I'm ready to execute. I just don't know when that epiphany is going to happen. Right. So sometimes it takes some. Right. Yeah. Three in the morning. Right, Right. What time is it now? I'll see at 3.

You're just not sure what day or how many weeks it's going to take.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm also very gut. Sensitive or attuned, but I tend to make it a lot faster.

Fast.

I tend to be very fast on the. On the decision.

Yeah. And I don't know how you do that, because what I've tried doing, I've tried thinking, you know what? I'm too slow of a decision maker. I'm gonna just gonna make a decision and go with it, even if the work product is not perfect. And I've always regretted that because guess what? The work product is not up to my standards.

You second guess yourself if you make it too quickly, don't you?

Sure I do. Yeah, absolutely. I'm not fully aligned yet with my action. Once I'm fully aligned internally, I'm all about it and like, you can hardly dissuade me from it, but I got to get aligned and that takes some time.

Now, we didn't ask this in getting ready, but is there any decision that you can see that you took a very long time on and it cost you something or you wish you'd made it faster, anything like that.

Well, you know, that's an interesting question. I often think, gee, have we missed market opportunities? And in a way, I'm trying to like, prove a negative by answering this question. We probably have missed market opportunities, right? Especially in the technology field, which is changing constantly. I'm constantly seeing new opportunities, new services, new products that we could provide to our customers. And I think to myself, oh man, that's a great opportunity right there and we should do something with that. But I don't have the bandwidth. I can't see. I can't put it into my priorities right now. And it's going to take a long time to execute. So I'm just going to kind of put it on the side for now. And I'm sure we've lost plenty of market opportunities that other entrepreneurs, other executives, other companies could have capitalized on if they move faster. I am generally a slow growth kind of business owner. I would rather get it right and feel really good about the output than like dive into something and screw it all up and lose sleep because I'm worried about the outcomes. So, sure, we've lost opportunities. I can't say I regret it because things are going great the way the ship is going.

So the opposite side, though, is also true because I know in preparation for the show, there's a decision that you made really quickly or too quickly that you regretted. Talk about that first time you fired someone and tell us about how that went.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this was, you know, I. So I told you that Ignition has had kind of two births. One when I was an independent consultant and then when I decided to grow it into a firm. And so an early hire that I made didn't work out and I decided I needed to let him go. And I had never fired anybody before. How do you do that? Do they even teach you that in business school? How to fire somebody? I don't. I bet they don't. So I didn't really know how to.

Just learn by experience over and over again. You get fired a few times and then you're like, maybe I should start.

My own business, Nick.

Then your clients can fire you, your suppliers can fire you, your bank can fire you.

Well, you know, I quit my last job when I was 23, so I didn't have. I haven't had enough experience in the workforce to have had a chance to get fired myself. So I didn't even know what it was like from the receiving end. So I was making this up as I go and I just decided, I actually was working with a business coach at the time. And he said, listen, this person is not the right fit. It's putting at risk your client relationships. You should let this person go soon. And I just took the business coach's advice and the next day I scheduled an in person meeting and fired this person. The thing is, the reason I regret it in retrospect is because I didn't really pay attention to what he was going through personally and I didn't give the full, diligent respect to him as a human being because that was the same week that his girlfriend of many years dumped him and his mom died. And as if that's not bad enough, I fired him on his birthday. So that was a bad year for him. And I knew it was his birthday. I just was really focused on, this is my thing, this is what I got to do. And I regret that. And it really taught me. I've done termination since then. Then I've handled much better because I've turned them into a conversation about, hey, listen, this isn't working out. What do you think? Do you think this is working out? You know, even if you think it's working out? Well, listen, I'm having trouble with it. Your colleagues are having trouble with it. Does this sound like a good fit? You know, like, if you have this conversation enough in a truthful manner, then like, people kind of understand, like it's time to like, like move on and. But I feel it's a much more respectful of their dignity.

So this first firing, you'd still fire them if you were doing it over again today? Just do it.

I would just do it more, I don't know, in a more human way. Yeah, not on his birthday. Okay. Like, maybe I could have put him on leave for two weeks and you know something, right?

I think if, I mean the thing that I noticed for myself over time, at first I was just willing to be a jerk, right? Willing to be the a hole and just chop somebody because it's what we got. Like, I'm going to be tough, I'm going to do it over time. I got kind of that thing that you are speaking to, I think that is just have some compassion and some communication, some interaction. And I think that greatly reduces your exposure to lawsuits, to, you know, labor board hearings or things like that. If you just like, look, this isn't working out and we got to make a change and got to do it now. It's Going to be hard. I get it. I understand. But at the same time, being like, look, I know there's something better for you, and the longer you're here, the longer your life isn't awesome, and you need to go be somewhere awesome.

You know, I had this great experience last year, so I fired somebody. I hope I did it much better. And a few months later, he invited me out to breakfast, and he said, thank you for firing me. I got the most wonderful position after this at a company that was just acquired by a much bigger company that I've always wanted to work for. And, like he was, he actually said, thank you for firing me. I actually want to get it like a mug and put that on there just to remind myself that, you know, it worked out and you can do it. Right?

So as you think about where you are now, this year and all that.

What are you grateful for? Well, you know, I'm always number one as a. As a. In the business world, I'm always grateful for my team. And that sounds like such a cliche, but, you know, every single day, we're on our daily standup or daily huddle, which we do over zoom, and I just, you know, I look at all their faces and I'm like, oh, my God, Thank God you're here. Thank God you're here. Thank God you're. Thank God for all of them. I'm so grateful for all of them. They're so smart and so talented, and, like, I couldn't do this without them. And I'm always trying to find new ways to show that sometimes it's like a slack emoji, Like a little heart emoji. I'm one of those managers that puts heart emojis into slack right now, looking at maybe sending them some surprise pandemic gifts in the mail and stuff. Just stuff just to keep them. I keep them knowing that, like, they're appreciated. So that's one thing is the team. Something else that I'm really grateful for is that all this hard work that I've done without knowing what I was doing has actually turned into something that is really strong and helps a lot of people. And, you know, as I told you before, we're a pretty unique company. We have a very, very unique specialty in the marketplace. And I don't think I would have gotten here if I hadn't been able to take a risk back when I was 23, and then again when I was 30, because, you know, starting your own business is a risky thing. I was actually. I was 23 when I started consulting and I called up somebody I knew who ran a small firm of his own, and I asked him, you know, should I do this? Is this, is this too risky? And he said, you know, when you're 23, there's no such thing as a risk. But it didn't feel that way to me as a 23 year old. Felt like a very risky thing to do. And I don't think I would have had the guts to take that risk if I had not been raised with a pretty good education, by parents who loved me with, you know, the particular shade of my skin and my gender identity and, you know, all those things, the place where I grew up, all those things that lined up in my background gave me like, each one of them kind of like piled on like a reservoir of strength that I was then able to call upon to take the risk, to be an entrepreneur, even though I didn't really understand I was, that I was calling upon all that, all those reserves of strength. And I think if any one of those had not been the case, then maybe I would not have been able to take the risk and I would never have been able to take that leap and be glad now, 23 years after I started this company that I did it.

So decades of company and starting family, that kind of thing, and greatly expanding the reach of the business. What do you brag about today? When you think about that time? What, what can you, what, where's your flex?

When I think about those, those 20 something years, you know, I try not to brag too much, not because I'm actually humble, but just because I don't think it comes off well. But, you know, we started this conversation with me saying how, you know, my dad told me basically, don't go work for anybody else if you can. And he actually said that, he said, you know, nice guys don't get treated well and bosses will never treat you well and just don't do it. And, you know, I saw how unhappy he was and I thought, I don't want to do that. And remarkably, decades later, I seem to have actually fulfilled that promise to myself. The story's not over. You know, I've still got decades left in my work life, but I'm pretty pleased. It took a long time because I move slowly, like we've said, but I've actually found a path for myself that I blazed in that kind of iconoclastic way that I like to do. And not only did it work out for me, but it seems to have worked out for a lot of other people. And I'm really proud of the products and services we bring to the marketplace that are really in demand and unique and very different. And that's all part of the iconoclasm that's kind of represented by our brand, which is because I kind of, like, couldn't do it any other way.

Ignite, right? And there ignite behind you.

Oh, yeah, right. That's actually a real fireplace. It just. Just looks like a tv.

What's a bad habit that you have and struggle with?

Oh, man. So, you know, I'm not the most diligent person. Right. That's probably part of why I go slowly at things. I tend to. I'm one of those, like, entrepreneurs who's really good with the vision and the idea and the inspiring people, that this is what it is, painting the picture for people. And I'm less good with the nitty gritty details of execution. And thank God I've got a great team behind me that's really good at that. But I could really use some help staying focused and accountability, which is, of course, why I'm in eo, because it helps me not just set a goal, but stay accountable to that goal, which, you know, is really the big part of the job. Setting the goal takes you a few minutes. Staying accountable will take you months, years. Who knows?

Is your team at all able to help you to be accountable and to stay focused?

You know, it's one of those interesting things I found. In general, my team does not confront me, even though, like, I'm one of those managers who invites dissent. But in general, I feel like they're very polite to me. The way that they encourage me is through my own sense of my responsibility to them. I have got to do my job as a manager and as a leader so that their jobs are stable and tolerable, and hopefully way better than tolerable. So I feel a strong impetus. I believe really strongly in leading by example, not by words. If I want them to behave in a certain way or follow certain principles, it's very important to me that I lead by example and actually behave that way and follow those principles myself. And part of that is being accountable to those around you.

So you have twins, right?

Yeah. Yep.

How much do they observe the way that you run the business and know about the business today?

You know, it's interesting. Here we are in Corona times. I realized one of the benefits of quarantine and distance learning is that they get to hear me on the phone and on zoom all the time, all day long. Even if they don't know what I'm talking about. And a lot of time I'm sure they don't. They get, they get to hear me do it and they get to. In a way, I'm modeling for them. Right. Just as I model for my team as much as I can, I'm modeling for them. Well, look, this is what your dad does, and this is what it means to run a small business and to work in technology. And this is what a meeting sounds like. I mean, that's pretty important. Like, I didn't know what a meeting sounded like when I started running meetings. I had no idea what meetings sounded like. Took me a while to figure out how to do it in a way that I felt was. Was the right way to do it. So they're getting a crash course by osmosis, right? Prior to this, very little visibility. They had very little visibility. I took them when they were young. I took them on a couple like, on site jobs, but they didn't, you know, they didn't pay too much attention. They wanted to like, sit on the iPad and play video games. So this is, it's, it's been a really. I think it's a cool experience. I don't know if they would agree, but someday I hope they'll realize they soaked up something just by listening.

So if you think out long term, do you want to leave them with a business, an opening? Do you want to leave them with money? Do you want to leave them with just a lesson? What's the legacy? If you look out 10 or 30 years in the future, what is it that you are building with this business that's important to you to leave behind?

Right? That's a good question. As parents, we're thinking about that a lot, right. I don't expect to leave them the business and just because it takes a really special kind of twisted character to do this. And I don't expect either one of them is gonna want to do that or have that particular knack. I might be wrong, but I just don't expect it. So I hope eventually that this business will generate some manner of wealth that I can leave to them financially, of course, and otherwise in kind of qualitative ways. I just want them to know that their dad built something from his own hands by treating people well and admitting his mistakes when he made them and learning. And learning and never stopping learning and using big words because big words are cool and they are. And I'm a writer, right. And that you can just, you know, you can blaze your own path in the world and it might take a while, but when it'll eventually become more and more clear as you go down that path. I don't know what their paths are going to be, but I hope they have as bizarre and fun a time going down theirs as I have done going down mine.

What would you say is your biggest challenge right now? What are you struggling with and grappling with and need to learn how to do?

Well, it depends. Do you mean like business, personal or anything?

I meant more in the business, but it could be.

You know, this is something that I think small businesses face a lot is that lead generation is hard. It's harder in some industries than in other industries. And it's something that I've always struggled with. We've always gotten most of our leads from referral and that's great. And they're wonderful leads. They always have a pressing need and they need to buy soon, which is what every salesperson hopes for. But it's not enough to scale a business either quickly or with much intention. I might say, oh, wow, there's this new product or service that I think we really should focus on and offer. But if I'm growing my business based on referrals alone, then I'm going to have a really hard time finding a marketplace big enough to support what we need in order to actually become experts in delivering that service. I've experimented over the years with a gazillion ways of generating leads. I've lost money on the vast majority of them. Right now we're starting with SEO and it's very early. It's too early to tell, but I mean, definitely our site rankings are starting to improve with actually only pretty early on in the process, which is great. We've had good luck also with email marketing to some extent. Otherwise, honestly, like, pay per click is like, it's way too expensive in our market segment. It's just way too expensive. So we've tried it. I've lost money. So I've lost money on most lead gen efforts that I've done, including outbound calling, etc. Now I figure somebody out there is listening to this and going, oh my God. Well, if you lost money on outbound dialing, then like, you should call me because I know how to do it right. Or if you, you know, if your keywords are too expensive, it's because you're not going long tail enough, call me and I'll do it right. I'm sure there are people out there who can excel in all these Areas, I'm just, I'm still looking for them. Part of it is finding the right match in a marketing team and in a leading.

Yeah, figuring out how to do that. Yeah, I totally get that. I would say that we have quite a few doing it. I tend to say it's less about that technique and more about being unique. So if you're finding it's really expensive to attract, you haven't honed in enough on the core customer. And what's you uniquely different about your offering. And so you're ending up competing with too many people because you're not targeted enough at that point.

That's what I love about talking to you, Bill. Every time I talk to you, I learn something.

Well, I have to remind myself of that lesson all the time. Like, okay, I need to find a better like keyword marketer, that kind of thing. I'm like, yeah, no, it's actually you need to go back from that and be more targeted. Figure out a little narrower core customer customer and a little more unique product offering. Our brand promise. Right.

I think you're right. And I think just in the last six months or so we've really kind of honed that unique offering that I believe is starting to pay dividends on the SEO and the email marketing front.

In the world of the SEO, the more unique your wording could be you who like big words and that kind of thing. Right. Your long tail. Click. You could get really fancy there with that. Just pull out your James Joyce and not your Hemingway if you want to be.

But not, not Finnegan's wake James Joyce.

Or be more obscure. Go in Nabokov.

Oh, right.

Hey, reminder to our listeners as we get.

Not Lolita Nabokov because that's.

No, no, no, no. That's creepy. Right? No longer. Okay, so this episode is sponsored by the Bay Area Entrepreneurs Organization known as eo. Our member led organization is the best place for entrepreneurs to find peers to connect with, to learn and grow. I've been a member of the organization for over 20 years across my different companies and the EO members that I've met around the Bay Area are supported and connected to 14,000 around the world. So we have pretty instant access. And I've gone and connected with members in throughout Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai. I'm trying to think all the different places, Jaipur and Delhi today, Cairo today. People that I've talked with just in the last 24 hours. Right. EO members for different business reasons. Tomorrow I'll be with a group in Bahrain and Kuwait. I think joining us so connected to a whole bunch of these people. If you'd like to get more information or even to apply for membership, just go to eonetwork.org or drop us a note. If this show was helpful to you, share it with somebody else. That's really useful. It really helps us a huge amount if you give us a rating and write a full review on itunes or wherever you get them. But if you subscribe to the show, you'll get them in your email every week and you can subscribe either on our website@scalingcoach.com or on iTunes, YouTube, wherever you stitcher, Spotify, wherever you go to get your podcasts and then you'll get them automatically. So we do Tuesday tips, we do a talk with a guru on Wednesday, and we do the Getting Real shows that we release on Sunday mornings. I want to give special thanks to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework, co founder of the EO Organization. Our show is produced by Lucy Summers, the audio is edited by Albert Burge at Podfly Productions and our show notes are written up by Ayan Kudina and Brufred by Tim McGowan. Thanks everyone and Keep Scaling up. Noam shout out to your business and where to find yours.

Yes, ignition is@ignitionit.com ignitionit.com in the show.

Notes there in the crawl on the video if you're watching video. So thanks everyone so much. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep Scaling Up.